Radical Sydney began in June 2010 as a site devoted to the book by Terry Irving and Rowan Cahill titled 'Radical Sydney: Places, Portraits and Unruly Episodes', published by UNSW Press (2010). While this function continues, the blog has expanded as a platform for radical writing about history. The blog is regularly archived in the Pandora Web Archive of the National Library of Australia.

Search This Blog

A RED METAMORPHOSIS by Terry Irving

The following essay has been written and published in response to increasing requests from researchers for information on the background and development of historian Terry Irving and his approach to history. As Rob Pascoe commented in 1979, Irving was prominent amongst the New Left historians who emerged in Australia during the 1960s, and forecast that his radical view of the past might be "rather too unsettling" for Australia/ns........the 'jury' is no doubt considering this, and related matters......[see Rob Pascoe, The Manufacture of Australian History, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1979, pp. 4, 159-160]. Irving has also written about his intellectual development on this blog in 'Shaping Histories', and in "'The triumph of green hearts over sere': reflections on student radicalism at Sydney University in the 1910s and 1960s".

I am an Australian academic – have been since 1964 – and I
come from a working-class family, but I don’t have a working-class voice. I
mean this in two senses: my voice as it sounds, and my voice as evidence of a
definitive identity.

I don’t sound – I never sounded – working class because my
parents were from the ‘respectable’ working class, an elite that was proud of
its skilled work and demanded recognition for it by adopting the ‘educated
Australian accent’ of the mid-twentieth century and the rules of middle-class
grammar. Today my classless voice conceals a particular history of phonetic and
grammatical class relations.

As to whether I have a working-class voice, my answer is
that I have several. Sometimes I remember my life as the elder son of a
working-class family and want to talk about belonging and solidarity and trust
in a present mostly lacking in them; sometimes I recall my upward path through
the status hierarchy and the anxieties it brought on; and often I want to emphasize
the class meaning of my intellectual identity. At least these are the voices
that I feel I can write about; were I more confident in the use of gender
theory I might also reflect on class and masculinity in my relations with women
and men.

******

Memories of the working class life of my
childhood in Sydney (NSW) between the end of the Second World War and the middle of the 1950s are, in many ways, communal and political. From noon on Saturday we had a day and a half when almost no one
worked for a boss; it was called the weekend, and it was when workers could
help each other. As wartime service ended families formed or re-formed,
‘returned-men’ invested their small savings in suburban building blocks, and
friends, family and work-mates shared the labour needed to make the working
class dream of home-ownership a post-war reality. As a carpenter and joiner my
father was in great demand. On Sundays the family would pile into the old car
and drive to wherever he had promised to help, or sometimes to our own block in
Ryde where his friends were waiting to help us. I watched our block cleared and
the foundations for a never-to-be-lived-in home dug; at other sites I saw
timber frames erected, fibro-asbestos sheeting nailed to the studs, doors and
windows installed, as houses closed the gaps in the streetscape, erected on
blocks that had been vacant for over twenty years and had served as playgrounds
for us war-time kids.

Despite these co-operative efforts the demand for housing
was not being met, so another way of coping was for families to share an existing
home. My parents created a spare bedroom by moving my younger brother and me to
the large back verandah, and a second kitchen (without a sink) by closing off
the small front verandah. For the next five years or so a string of couples,
sometimes with children, lived with us in our rented, 1920s brick cottage. I’m
sure the landlord was never informed, just as I’m sure the exploding beer
bottles below our unlined, uncarpeted, unenclosed verandah-bedroom were not
legally brewed.

From the families who shared our home I had my first
lessons in working class history. I learnt about the ‘eviction wars of 1931’,
when members of the Unemployed Workers’ Movement barricaded themselves inside
the homes of unemployed families unable to pay the rent, meeting force with force
when the police came to evict the families. In our spare bedroom in 1949 lived
a young woman who had grown up

in a ‘happy valley’, as the shanty-towns of
tents and humpies for evicted families were ironically called. Another family
from Broken Hill had tales of militant strikes and the power of the Barrier
Industrial Council. After school one day I was introduced to a man – he looked
very old and sick – whose name was Fred Paterson. Later my mother told me he
was the former Communist member of the Queensland Parliament who had been
bashed by police while observing a protest march in Brisbane

In the evenings our lounge room seemed always full of
visitors. There were parties (‘socials’) when singers gathered around the
piano; ‘cottage lectures’ by ‘speakers’ on the need to preserve world peace and
ban atomic weapons; and rehearsals of the trade union choir my mother belonged
to. On one memorable occasion, with blankets nailed to the walls, the lounge
room became a makeshift studio to record the choir.

The events I describe occurred because both my parents had
separately joined the Communist Party during the war. My father, a firm trade
unionist, having been brought up in the coal-mining town of Cessnock (where his
brother was a miner and both his sisters were married to miners), a town which
at one stage had a communist-led local council until the Labor government
changed the electoral rules, was recruited while serving as an aircraftsman in
the Northern Territory. Meanwhile, my mother, alone with two young children,
was recruited over the back fence by Gilbert Stead, the brother of novelist
Christina Stead. My mother, a trained psychiatric nurse, was from a family of
South Australian settlers who had owned shops, preached Swedenborgian religion,
surveyed the telegraph line to Darwin, or, in the case of her father, photographed the state’s
notable citizens. But by the time she came along, a slide down the social scale
had begun. She left school at 14. None of my father’s or my mother’s brothers
and sisters had any education beyond the minimum required for school leavers.

******

This is how I remember getting to university. We sat in the
headmaster’s office, my mother and I, waiting to hear his answer to her
question: what should my son do now that his schooling was coming to an end. I
saw an old man whom I had never met during the five years I had spent in his
selective NorthShore high school. He saw a middle-aged working-class woman and
a boy who had made no noticeable impact on the sporting, academic or military
life of the school. I hid my excitement, expecting to hear that my exam marks
entitled me to go to university. Instead, he put us in our place: I should go
straight to Teachers’ College for a career in primary school teaching.

I detected that my mother felt that we had been slighted,
but perhaps she was also relieved. She knew of my hopes, and she had always
been proud of my achievements in schoolwork, but since her divorce from my
father in the early 1950s the family’s financial position was precarious. Could
we afford to send me to university? Perhaps I should think about earning some
money. Wouldn’t an office job suit me better? She was always telling my brother
and me to ‘keep your head down’; ‘don’t get above your station’; ‘you’re not
the only pebble on the beach’ (oh, we were very English on the lower NorthShore). Schooling was a good thing as long as it led to greater
material security. This vaguely irritated me. I can’t say that I rejected her
utilitarian approach to schooling, but I did feel that it was wrong. For one
thing it cheapened learning, which I liked. In Primary school at Roseville I had been dux and captain. For another, it was short
sighted. It seemed possible that through schoolwork I could aim even higher
than office work, disturbing though this might be to the relationship with my
mother.

In my mother’s thought-universe the revolutionary party
leader ranked higher than a state school principal, so she approached her
comrades for advice about my future. It was OK, she told me. Sam Lewis had said
that one of the functions of Teachers’ Colleges was to be the university of the
working class. Lewis (1901-1976) was the leading Communist in the NSW Teachers' Federation (President: 1945-52, 1964-68).

When I discovered that the Education Department’s
scholarship for intending high school teachers paid a small stipend and a book
allowance for the duration of a three-year undergraduate course, and when I
promised to continue to work at holiday jobs, as I had since I was 15, my
mother conceded that my going to university might be possible. Now it was up to
me. I surprised myself, and no doubt some other people too, by winning the
school prize for history and two scholarships. So, as it turned out neither
party nor state authority would determine my future. At the beginning of 1956 I
became a student in the Arts faculty of the University
of Sydney.

******

As I contemplated my first day as a university student I
realized I had no idea of what to wear. Without the security of a school
uniform I was about to discover for the first time ‘the hidden injuries of
class’.

When I turned fifteen my mother had bought me a ‘business
suit’, so I could serve behind a department-store counter or run errands in a
city office in the school holidays, but would a heavy, dark blue
double-breaster be right? No, those uni boys in the DJs adverts were never
dressed like clerks or salesmen; something more casual was needed. So I bought
from Gowings a cheap ‘sports coat’ – brown, rough and heavy – more tweedy than
sporty. After a few days as a fresher, among the blazers and cravats, the twin
sets and faux pearls, and dripping with sweat as a Sydney summer came to a stifling end, I knew the coat was a dead
give-away: I had no style, no money, and no savoir-faire.

But I was young - seventeen and a quarter when I fronted up
to sign the matriculation register during Orientation Week – and exhilarated by
the challenge of new subjects to study and new folkways to follow. Here I was
at the University of Sydney – the oldest in the country - whose degrees admitted you
to the state’s elite – a vague entity, as was the university itself. I wasn’t
sure how I felt about entering an elite. Politically, as I was a socialist, it
would be an issue, but if it meant not being condescended to like my mother
was, it might be all right. I wasn’t ambitious - just tired of pretending and
scrimping.

******

Was I the only working-class student at SydneyUniversity in the late 1950s? It certainly felt like it. There would
have been a few of us in the Labour Club but we never talked about our
families, perhaps because we were too insecure socially.

Strangely enough, in my second year I was part of an
academic study that did seek answers to questions about where students came
from (in terms of their father’s occupation) and how they experienced
university life. I had enrolled in Education I, and as part of the course each
student was required to administer a set of questions to a householder who was
part of a ‘community’ sample chosen by four academics in the Department. I duly
caught the bus to Manly to meet my assigned interviewee, but I recall being
only mildly interested in what the study might reveal, or in the social survey
as a way of acquiring knowledge; I was a literary not a ‘sciency’ type, and
anyway the book based on the study was not published until 1964 (Hugh Philp, R. L. Debus, Vija Veidemanis and W. F. Connell, The University and its Community, Ian Novak, Sydney, 1964).

Now that I have read the book I know the answer to my
question. I was not the only student with working-class parents on campus. The
authors took a second sample of undergraduates at the same time, and in this
sample there were 69 students or 12.3% whose fathers (like mine) were in
occupations that could be grouped as ‘skilled trades’. In the ‘community
sample’ the number was double, 26%. There were even some students whose fathers
worked in ‘semi-skilled’ or ‘unskilled’ jobs. Altogether, undergraduates from
the blue-collar working class were 18% of the student body, but our share of
the ‘community’ sample was 44.6%.

This skewing of the undergraduate sample did not surprise
the authors, because, as they reported, it was similar to that ‘revealed in
other studies of university populations’. This was confirmed in 1980, when the
Education, Research and Development Committee published a study of the social
composition of students

in higher education. As the aim of the study was to measure
the impact of the abolition of fees by the Whitlam Labor government in 1974,
the authors began with a chapter surveying earlier studies of the origins of
Australian students. Here is their conclusion on the class background of
students before the 1970s:

“There is almost a surfeit of evidence that the great
majority of students at Australian universities tend to come from the upper
socio-economic levels of society. … High ranking professional and
administrative families, which make up only a small percentage of the
population, contribute approximately half of all university students, whereas
manual and skilled workers, who make up almost half of the workforce,
contribute a disproportionately small number of students.”

The Whitlam Government’s reform of higher education was
meant to alter this situation. Why? Because the workforce was changing:
competition from cheap labour economies overseas persuaded the government to
give up on manufacturing and shift the working class into service and
administrative jobs. For that objective a more highly educated workforce was
needed. Secondly, unemployment among young people was rising, and getting
working class kids out of the dole queues by keeping them longer at school and
university would avoid social disorder. Thirdly, there was already too much
disorder, as the new social movements became combative, attracting young people
into the campaigns of women, Blacks, greenies and peaceniks. Solution: accept
that universities, albeit infested with lefties, were in essence disciplining
institutions, and, compared to hanging around on the streets, privileged
out-stations for working class kids. At least the young malcontents could be
bottled up in their own reserves, where in time they might learn to comply,
especially when they realized that their future employment depended upon it.

That at least was how the left understood the reasons
behind Whitlam’s expansion of the higher education sector and abolition of
university tuition fees. Of course, we were not too hopeful: social engineering
on this scale takes time, not to speak of a real commitment to social equality.
And we were right. Before long HECS was introduced as social democracy began to
morph into neo-liberalism. So, forty years later, in the matter of
democratizing the student population the situation may even be worse. According
to the Bradley Report (Review of Australian Higher Education, 2008)
participation in higher education ‘by indigenous people, people with low
socio-economic status and those from regional and remote areas … has been
static or falling over the last decade’. In 2007, participation in Australian
universities by those with ‘low SES’ was 15%, when the proportion of this group
in the general population was 25%. Professor Bradley was concerned. She asked
the government to ensure that 20% of ‘undergraduate enrolments in higher education
should be students from low socio-economic backgrounds’ by 2020.8 Given that
neo-liberalism dominates public policy, I’m not holding my breath.

******

Too young to drink; too poor to have a girl friend; too
different in social background and political beliefs to mix easily with fellow
students: my first year was a bit of a disaster. I found a few congenial types
in the tiny Labour Club – a refuge for Commo and working-class kids – but the
atmosphere at club events was defensive and suspicious - not surprisingly as
this was the height of the first Cold War. My courses disappointed me. The
survey of English literature was too broad to be intellectually engaging; in
Philosophy the Scottish accents of the lecturers were impenetrable; Psychology
was ruined by a compulsory statistics module; and in History I made the mistake
of taking the ‘Ancient’ course whose main lecturer was boring in the extreme.
At the end of year, although I passed in everything, I only just managed to
qualify for the Honours program in History that began in Second Year.

Cold War portrait of WWF leader 'Big Jim' Healy (1898-1961)at work in his office.

But then things looked up. My substitute home became the
campus where I arrived early each day and left late at night. There I could eat cheaply, relax for free in the comfy lounges in the Holme Building, meet for coffee and intrigue in the Refectory, write my essays in the Library, and pretend to be a film buff at screenings by the Film Group. I could also indulge my love of theatre at performances by The Players and SUDS. Every Wednesday there was a Labour Club meeting to organize and every Thursday a table to set up inScience Road with books and pamphlets. As an office bearer of the
Labour Club I was becoming a minor campus identity; now it was easy to find a
group of friends to go to the pub with on Friday night where we would bask in
our radical notoriety and exaggerate our political successes. One of those was
the meeting I chaired where Big Jim Healy was the speaker. Healy was the
long-time General Secretary of the Wharfies Union, a leading Communist, much in
the news then because of a long-running industrial campaign that was causing
apoplexy among the commentators in the anti-communist newspapers. We knew this
would be a big meeting so we booked the old Union Hall. At five past one on the
day of the meeting I met Healy at the top of the Union Steps and led him onto
the stage. The crowd hissed and yelled. I tried in vain to introduce him.
Finally the uproar subsided sufficiently for Healy, an imposing figure with a
north of England accent, to begin. ‘In society’, he boomed, ‘there are two
classes.’ I feared the speaker’s Marxist lecture would not be received well.
Then he went on, with a smile, ‘Men and women’. The crowd roared their
appreciation, and Healy proceeded to put his case.

By this time I was a member of the even tinier University
branch of the Communist Party. For insisting on a full discussion of Stalin’s
crimes and the ‘cult of personality’ in world Communism, exposed by Khruschev
in his 1956 secret speech to the Russian party’s 20th congress, we were accused
of factionalism and revisionism by party headquarters. Given the way I had been
socialized as a ‘red diaper’ baby, this was unsettling, as was the party’s
catechetical approach to the study of Marxism in party educational classes. I
recall being sharply pulled into line by ‘the tutor’ (a minor trade union
official) for interrogating The 18th Brumaire to discover the limits as well as
the strengths of Marx’s historical materialism. Among students the party’s
‘leadership’ was hardly visible. Promoting the Russian line on world peace was
the only activity that had any support, and even that was minimal. Perhaps the
highlight in this regard was a joint Labour Club and Student Christian Movement
demonstration against nuclear tests in 1958 outside the offices of the US
Consulate in Barrack
Street. There
were maybe 20 of us. The Consul kindly met a deputation; the daily press
ignored us; and we felt like real revolutionaries at the pub afterwards. I
stayed in the party as long as I could, leaving after several years of
inactivity in 1964.

******

As a student activist and a young intellectual my working
class voice was political. When I spoke in that context it was not my ‘SES’ nor
my experiences in a working class family that defined me, but rather my
conscious decision to align myself with working-class politics, to be a labour
intellectual. I am not relying on hindsight when I say this. Nor was it at the
time a particularly ‘intellectual’ step to take. This last point may seem hard
to understand for twenty-first century believers in the power of the working
class, because due to its present demobilized state they need to compensate by
having the pure light of theory flood their minds with the certainties of
History. Back in the 1950s and 60s we student radicals were not very
‘theoretical’; we didn’t have to be because we had an ‘actually existing’
working-class public – of newspapers, journals, theatres, social clubs, film
groups, radio programs, and educational bodies - to immerse ourselves in. We
marched in the annual May Day processions; our Commem Day floats were
constructed in the studio of the Wharfies union’s art group. We wrote for
Tribune or Australian Left Review, partied with the Bushwackers, and camped at
the Springwood site owned by the Seamen’s Union.

This class voice carried over into my academic career
choices. When I wrote my BA honours and doctoral theses they focused on
political ideas, political movements, and representative government. Moving
from History to the Department of Government and Public Administration in 1968
was a logical move because it meant I could specialize in these areas, as well
as discovering new ones, such as democratic political theory, the sociology of
political movements, and the structural analysis of class, gender and
generation. In the 1970s, I became an advocate of staff-student control of the
Department, opposing professorial prerogatives and reorganising my courses
around projects and class assemblies. In my research I preferred to work
collaboratively, at a time when the usual pattern of publication was by sole
authorship.

While a young academic I was caught up in the first New
Left around Outlook and Arena because it was a development of the Old Left. But
gradually, with rise of new middle class and the generational revolt of the
1960s, the class composition of the left changed. The second New Left, with
which I was also associated through Sydney’s Free U and a series of left conferences for
intellectuals, was middle class, bohemian and mostly located in educational
institutions. It introduced me to participatory democracy and anarchist ideas
(the latter only partly acknowledged by me at the time).

******

Finally, two reflections: academics were not working class
in cultural or structural terms when I began, and very few had working class
backgrounds (I can recall meeting only one). But now that most suffer from
precarious employment the class position of academics has changed. They have
lost almost all control of their labour power. There has also been a
corresponding change in the understanding of intellectuals, away from the
purely cognitive to a functional understanding, so that what they do can be
called ‘work’. In this sense too academics are becoming part of a
post-industrial working class.

Bearing this in mind, let us not be taken in by the
apparently progressive idea of making the student population more
representative. When radical intellectuals first turned their attention to the
role of universities it was in the 1910s. By that time there were some bursaries
and scholarships for university study. Did the radicals call for an increase in
the number of ‘low SES’ students? Yes, but their demand was also much broader.
They advocated a radical reform of universities from a working-class point of
view, including what was taught, how it was taught, and how decisions were
made. Of course, in making this demand they had the benefit of a surge of
support for popular control of government, for democracy as a social movement.
If that kind of ‘savage democracy’ were to rise again – as it might, in the
light of the recent popular movements elsewhere – it would make it possible to
envisage something new in Australia’s higher education policy: the
democratization of universities.